We spoke to John Paul Lederach ahead of the launch of his new website which offers an archive of his work across nearly four decades of engagement in peacebuilding throughout the world.
John Paul Lederach, Senior Fellow, Peacebuilding at Humanity United and Professor Emeritus of International Peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in the fields of peace studies and conflict transformation. We spoke to him about his recently launched website which offers an archive of his work across nearly four decades of engagement in peacebuilding throughout the world.
HU: Please tell us more about how the idea for this resource came about.
JPL: The catalyst came when I got one of many legitimate requests I received sent me searching for an article I knew I had written and just could not find for days. Truth be known, I was in and out of at least three old computers sleuthing around in my own catacombs! When I finally did locate the piece, it was not in a format I could share with the person who needed it. That was like the ah-hah moment — the recognition that so much of what I had written, created, and co-created over the course of my career existed but was spread around in different places and formats, with no easy accessible place these materials could be found or shared. In conversation and reflection with colleagues, it became apparent that creating such a gathering place could be valuable for practitioners, students, and scholars of peacebuilding, social change, conflict transformation, reconciliation, and adjacent fields, as well as for newcomers just curious about these areas of practice.
HU: What kind of content can individuals find in this resource?
JPL: While there are a lot of ways that one piece of work leads to another — in fact we used one of my favorite images, a spider web, to illustrate connections — this archive of resources coheres around two big organizing areas: vocational reflections and galleries.
Vocational reflections include books and book chapters, journal and blog articles, interviews and podcasts, speeches and conference contributions, and resources connected to initiatives I’ve been involved with across the years.
Why vocation? Why reflection? Vocation is about following voice, this deeper sense of purpose which has always animated my life journey and work. Reflection captures a core quality defining not only how I choose to walk this journey but also how I seek to understand and bring meaning to what I have experienced and learned from those who walked with me. Scholars might call this inductive methodology. Some might prefer the notion of thick description, this effort to capture in more detail how things work and cohere. I have always thought of this as a pause, sometimes I called it a vocational pause: I stop to notice what situations, people, and lived experience is offering, teaching, and illuminating.
In galleries, I needed a place to hold my exploration of other ways of knowing beyond what the mainstream of what the academe tends to value. In many regards, galleries holds the art and soul of the journey, with different forms of writing – poetry in particular — to audio and video recordings, as well as multimedia resources. I have often found two things to be true. First, if I can see something, I can better understand or explain something. Hence, my love affair with napkin doodles and images and metaphor. Second, I have found it enormously renewing and deeply revealing to stay open and engaged with significantly different ways of knowing — from the great gift of wisdom, faith, and indigenous traditions, to nature as mentor, to the unfolding of the artistic spirit. Galleries is like being invited into a room to explore and sense these ways of being and knowing, which I feel offer us so much with regard to the complexity of what walking with deep conflict and cultivating the soils of change require.
A final note, in all of this, we have done our best to make these materials as accessible as possible, including full manuscripts where we have the permission to do so, transcripts, and links to view, download, or otherwise access referenced materials.
HU: What do you hope visitors to the site will take away from the content?
JPL: I suppose first and foremost, I hope you feel welcome and that your imagination is invited and evoked. I believe in the healing power of beauty. Second, I hope it is easy to find what you are looking for. If you come with a specific question or are looking for a specific resource, I hope you will be able to easily access this resource and answer your question. At the same time, I hope you will come away with more curiosity and possible pathways to pursue your inquiry. This is the case for all visitors — that they may find answers to the questions they came with, and come away with more curiosity and questions to live into.
HU: You have been involved in peacebuilding efforts across a wide range of contexts over the last 40 plus years. In the process of developing the site, what were some of the feelings and thoughts that came up for you personally?
JPL: Excited and scared! Excited, because for the first time it was possible to have all these things in one place, and perhaps even more, excited to see things I had not remembered, particularly some that seemed to have a more enduring quality. Scared because, when you read something you wrote 40 years ago, well you wish you could just update this a bit, bring it into more contemporary ways of reflecting the idea or language. But, the idea of an archive is to let the journey speak. I chose to leave things as they were at the time they appeared.
HU: How can different kinds of peacebuilders (practitioners, researchers, policymakers, students) utilize this resource?
JPL: The website is designed to support people in various ways. If people have a specific resource they are looking for, such as a practitioner or student looking for a particular reference, they can use the search function to quickly access this piece. If people are coming to the website interested in a particular theme or geography where I’ve worked, this is best explored through vocational reflections. In this section, people can also find resources associated with different aspects of craft (for example facilitation exercises, diagrams, and language) as well as a selection of initiatives I’ve been a part of over the years.
If people are more interested in the contemplative and creative aspects of my work, they can navigate to the galleries section, which houses my explorations into poetry, photography, the soundscapes of song and story, as well as guided practices to encourage reflection and greater quality of presence.
HU: For someone not yet familiar with your peacebuilding efforts, where would you recommend they start?
JPL: If people are not familiar with peacebuilding, I recommend navigating to the New to Peacebuilding page. This page offers reflections on the practice of peacebuilding, as well as links to a few suggested items to serve as a starting place to learn more about this discipline. Notably, I recommend people read The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. This book offers insight into four disciplines that I’ve come to understand as foundational to building peace.